You Should Have To Commit Mass Murder To Recruit Minthara In Baldur’s Gate 3, Actually

Larian’s fifth patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 has been an absolute doozy, taking up 30GB of space, adding two new modes, new epilogue scenes, and much more. With the amount of content the developers are consistently adding to the game, one could hardly blame you for wanting to wait till the post-game updates slow down before you continue playing. I’ve been taking my time since I started the game, which has worked to my benefit in the end.

Among all the quality of life additions, new story content, bug-fixing, and game modes, Larian added in an unexpected change: you can now recruit Minthara to your party without doing any unimaginably cruel acts of violence. Before, you’d have to side with the goblins in Act 1, raid the Emerald Grove, and murder a whole lot of innocent tiefling refugees. That’s the way Larian intended for you to be able to recruit her – players were apparently so desperate to add her to the party during their non-evil runs that they were turning her into a sheep and forcibly dragging her along with them.

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Larian saw this and decided to put those players out of their misery – you can just knock her out while taking down the Goblin Camp and she’ll appear at Moonrise Towers in Act 2, where you can then add her to your party. The thing is… I don’t think that Larian should have added this at all. It should have left it as it is. I know players are always happy to be given more options, and I generally think that’s the way it should be, but in this case, it’s the wrong move.

This Defeats The Whole Point Of Her Being Recruitable

The point of Minthara is that she’s kind of a hidden party member. Do things the morally right way, the way I assume most players will run their first playthrough, and you might not even realise you can have her join her party, because she’ll be stone dead. Lead Features Editor Jade King wrote about how delighted she was that she could irreversibly wipe a potential party member off the map and that Larian is willing to hide options like this from players, and I feel the same way.

Only being able to recruit the genocidal drow by making some downright reprehensible choices means that you have to commit to a bad run, and that you won’t get to see everybody’s stories in a single playthrough. That’s fun. It means you have to make difficult choices about the kind of character you’re going to roleplay as. I knew that Minthara was recruitable when I played the first act, and I knew damn well I was not going to be committing genocide on any scale in this playthrough, even if it meant I would get her. But next playthrough, who knows? Maybe I’ll do a Dark Urge run and aim to be as terrible a person as possible.

By removing the necessity of committing to a bad run, Larian has removed the weight of having Minthara be recruitable at all. And to do this just because fans wanted it is, unfortunately, pandering. It weakens the impact of the game by making your choices less important and permanent, and that sucks, because that’s exactly what made so many of us fall in love with the game in the first place. Larian should be sticking to its guns, especially when it comes to not compromising the narrative strength of the game, but it’s giving in to player feedback in places where they really shouldn’t. It’s a disappointing move.

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